What is RQDA and what are its features?

RDQA is a R package for Qualitative Data Analysis, a free (free as freedom) qualitative analysis software application (BSD license). It works on Windows, Linux/FreeBSD and Mac OSX platforms. RQDA is an easy to use tool to assist in the analysis of textual data. At the moment it only supports plain text formatted data. All the information is stored in a SQLite database via the R package of RSQLite. The GUI is based on RGtk2, via the aid of gWidgetsRGtk2. It includes a number of standard Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis features. In addition it seamlessly integrates with R, which means that a) statistical analysis on the coding is possible, and b) functions for data manipulation and analysis can be easily extended by writing R functions. To some extent, RQDA and R make an integrated platform for both quantitative and qualitative data analysis.

Through the GUI, RQDA can:

Import documents from plain text or on-the-fly

Import PDF highlights which is useful for content management of literature (reliant on rjpod)

Support non-English documents. Simplified Chinese Character is well-tested under Windows as well as Debian Linux (with locale of zh_CN.UTF-8)

Character-level coding using codes

File Editing after coding

Memos of documents, codes, coding, project, files and more

Retrieval of coding, and easily return to the original file (to ease the problem of segmentation). Conditional retrieval is supported as well.

Single-file (*.rqda) format, which is basically a SQLite database. Data are stored in UTF-8, so it should be portable

Organize codes into code categories, which is key to theory building. I deliberately avoid using tree-like categorization

Organize files into file categories

Search files by keywords with highlighting of the keyword in the open file.

Apply attributes to file, which is useful for content analysis

There is a case category and related attributes of cases, which is a crucial feature in bridging qualitative and quantitative research.

Search information about a selected case on the Internet via a pop-up menu

You can use help(package="RQDA") to see more functions of the RQDA package.

Installation for Windows and Linux

Step one, Install GTK+ (because RGtk2 depends on GTK+, you need to install it before install RGtk2). For windows user, download GTK+ and install it. For Debian-based Linux users, you may use sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev to install GTK+ developer library. In Fedora use yum install -y gtk2-devel to install. For other Linux users, you may have to manually install GTK+, download the source tarball, and follow the instructions of installation. You can refer to this page for installation of RGtk2.

Step two, Install R. Go to CRAN, download R and install it. For Linux and BSD users, you can download binary version of R or the source code. For Windows users, you can download the binary version of R from the download page. More instructions about installing R are in the R Installation and Administration Manual.

Step three, Launch R for further installation. It can be launched as a normal application in Windows, or by command R within a shell terminal in Linux and FreeBSD. Then, you can see the prompt “>”,which indicates that R is ready for further commands.

Step four, Install relevant R packages by command: install.packages("RQDA",dependencies=c("Depends",
"Imports")) . If you want to use the developer version of RQDA, you can use this command after you have installed RQDA by using the command: install.packages("RQDA",repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org", type="source").

Step five, Launch RQDA using command library(RQDA) from within R. Then you can see the RQDA GUI.
For Debian Linux users, there is a apt repositories, you can follow the guidelines there.>

For non-R-users who use Windows, you can download a rar file from Baidu Yun Pan, extract it to, say, c:\. Then you can launch the RQDA by double clicking the RQDA.bat file.

What's new?

RQDA 0.2-8 is released on CRAN (2016-12-12). The most important changes include profile matrix (Kuckartz, 2014) and Portuguese translation, among others. Unfortunately, this release is not compatible with RSQLite 1.1.0, which means that you need to downgrade RSQLite to 1.0.0 to make RQDA works properly. This problem will be fixed in development version on GitHub.

RQDA 0.2-5 is released on CRAN (2014-03-26). This update is in compliance with CRAN policies, but has no significant new features. JRE is required to used rjpod enhancement.